On building malaysian.ai

had some fun vibe designing the malaysian.ai website and brand

designed and shipped primarily on the new codex app (from openai) + antigravity (for image generation) in 3 hours

thought of documenting the process and story and also a little about the future of vibe design and what this might look like

further work: logo, revisit the copy in detail, get the forms working, add pics of events & the residency, maybe veo3 the hero's and animate it lightly on loop.

first, a little context

over the last couple of months, khailee, joseph and isaac had this idea of creating a space to concentrate talent of builders building AI native.

the idea is even the biggest movements are sparked by a (very) small group of high agency, ambitious people who meet and indirectly learn from each other & work together. density matters more than volume, as it affects the energy and feedback loops of a community.

khailee created a space at 500 global's office, which was super sick. joseph invited me for a thursday session, was really cool meeting everyone for the first time.

and from there more people came, we had weekly show and tells on thursdays

and things were generally pretty casual and experimentative

2026, the goal is to double down

• get more people excited
• concentrate efforts
• spark a lot more serious builders who creating awesome products and companies in malaysia that become huge
  • with the goal of multiple unicorns coming out of this mafia.
• add more structure for the above.

a website would be convenient to funnel people in

• traffic didn't really have anywhere to go before
• it's like a if you know, you know situation
• the residency is also becoming more cohort based and we want to see people moving fast.

and I think we could be more ambitious with it too

• going viral as a leading residency in SEA
• attracting global talent to apply, live in malaysia for 3 months
• funneling funding from sponsors and corporates to important initiatives in upskilling talent ahead of the great retrenchment.
• creating more opportunities for startups too to acquire major customers and move fast.

that's what the website was for.

the vibe design process

• started with a very simple marketing website boilerplate that I created before. just had a hero section structure, navbar, footer, spacing & padding and a default globalcss/tailwind setup. This was based on the rakantutor.org website that I made, which I asked codex to turn into a boilerplate.
• asked ai to refer to faw's previous 500.house website repo to build out an mvp for the landing page
• I wrote some notes in Cleve about what I wanted to communicate in the website across the pages, asked Cleve to edit it and make it better copy
• Copied the whole copy into codex and asked it to implement it.
  • Tip: Great websites always start with copy. Design revolves around the copy
• Ran multiple simutaneous sessions on multiple pages. to prompt my edits. I'd use voice and give feedback on the pages and queue feedback.
  • Tip: you can parallelise if you componentize the pages. So Hero was a different component from the other parts.
• This way I could reliably run multiple sessions giving feedback on different parts and the agents wouldn't conflict with each other
• Built out the residency page first, then asked codex to duplicate this structure for the homepage, and others.
  • Tip: Design in properly with good layouts, then duplicate.
• Prompt: I told it to use a super simple hyperminimalist museum gallery style.
• Tip: Also when prompting, dont' give the model solutions or instructions, just state problems. They problem solve better this way.
• A lot of times AI would generate unnecessarily complex things first, then I ask it to delete this, remove that, etc.
  • Tip: Use low reasoning settings for most things. it's just so much faster.
• generated all the images with nanobanana with Antigravity. Antigravity can generate directly in your code so reduces a copy and paste step. Prompt was super simple, just "Batik art with darker colours featuring a village in malaysia / featuring a malaysian city surrounded in forests" (the darker colours helped improve readibility of the text over the image). Images generated in square so it's good for both mobile and laptop as I'm using viewport height for the cover images.
• auto-deployed with vercel

lessons

• I initially built it in vite, and then did a refactor to next.js later for seo (though I realised there was a difference between server side rendering and simple static pages, and the benefits of SSR only affect dynamic content so wouldn't affect this 😂 at least for now haha)
  • tho either way, refactoring was automatically done with codex 5.2 and worked one-shot. I guess that's better for futureproofing

I'll make the repo open source once faw / rashad have had a quick look just in case I didn't do anything disastrous HAHA meanwhile feel free to ask me to add you to the repo